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Frenchman 'admits' to Brussels shooting

Pauline Talagrand and Andrea Bambino

A Frenchman who spent more than a year in Syria has claimed responsibility for last week's deadly shooting at a Jewish Museum in Brussels, prosecutors say.

Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, who was arrested by customs agents on Friday on arrival in the southern French city of Marseille, is believed to have recorded the claim in a 40-second video found in his possession along with a Kalashnikov and a handgun.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the "repeat offender" explains in the film that he had attached a GoPro camera to his bag to record his shooting rampage, but it had not worked.

Instead, Nemmouche later "filmed his weapons and said he carried out the attack against the Jews in Brussels", prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw on Sunday told a simultaneous press conference in the Belgian capital.

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However, Van Leeuw added: "We can't guarantee that it is his voice heard on the recording."

Molins said the suspect, who arrived in France on a bus from Amsterdam via Brussels, was also carrying a "white cloth" carrying an inscription in Arabic of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - Syria's most extremist group - and the words "Allah is great".

He described Nemmouche as a "battle-hardened lone wolf" who left for Syria on December 31, 2012, just three weeks after being released from prison. He appears to have fought alongside the ISIL fighters and returned to Europe in March this year.

The French prosecutor said Nemmouche converted to radical Islam during five stints in prison.

Nemmouche, originally from Roubaix in northern France, was known to the French domestic intelligence agency DGSI, said one source close to the case.

A lone gunman entered the Jewish museum in the heart of Brussels last Saturday, removed an automatic rifle from a bag and opened fire through a door before leaving.

An Israeli couple and a Frenchwoman died on the scene and a 24-year-old Belgian man was left clinically dead.

Molins said Nemmouche said little during the interrogation, describing himself as a homeless man who lived in Belgium.

He is being questioned by the DGSI who can hold him for up to 96 hours, until Tuesday, or 144 hours, to Thursday, if investigators invoke an imminent terrorist threat.

His family, meanwhile, reacted with horror, describing him as taciturn but harmless.

"He is nice, intelligent, educated and has done a year at university," Nemmouche's aunt told reporters, adding that the family was "very shocked".

She said Nemmouche had been raised in a foster home and then by his grandmother, and the family lost contact with him after he was sent to prison.

"He never went to the mosque or spoke of religion," she said.

The attack was the first such incident in more than 30 years in Belgium and has revived fears of a return of violent anti-Semitism to Europe.

Some 40,000 Jews live in Belgium, roughly half in Brussels and the remainder in the port city of Antwerp.